Exercise - Start and stop your VM with the Azure CLI

  • 5 minutes

One of the main tasks you'll want to do while running virtual machines is to start and stop them.

Stop a VM

We can stop a running VM with the vm stop command. You must pass the name and resource group, or the unique ID for the VM:

az vm stop \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group <rgn>[sandbox resource group name]</rgn>

We can verify the VM has stopped by attempting to ping the public IP address, using ssh, or through the vm get-instance-view command. This final approach returns the same basic data as vm show, but includes details about the instance itself. Try entering the following command into Azure Cloud Shell to see the current running state of your VM:

az vm get-instance-view \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group <rgn>[sandbox resource group name]</rgn> \
    --query "instanceView.statuses[?starts_with(code, 'PowerState/')].displayStatus" -o tsv

This command should return VM stopped as the result.

Start a VM

We can do the reverse through the vm start command.

az vm start \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group <rgn>[sandbox resource group name]</rgn>

This command will start a stopped VM. We can verify it through the vm get-instance-view query we used in the last section, which should now return VM running.

Restart a VM

Finally, we can restart a VM if we've made changes that require a reboot by running the vm restart command. You can add the --no-wait flag if you want the Azure CLI to return immediately without waiting for the VM to reboot.